Richard Elliot

Setting His Own Destiny

Artist Interview by: Norm Breest

June 2005 - Richard Elliot has always been one who has made his own trail to success. The Glasgow, Scotland-born saxophonist started his career by touring with the Pointer Sisters and Natalie Cole and then played as a studio musician for Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Temptations and the Yellowjackets. His Yellowjacket work helped Elliot gain a spot on their tour in the 80's and later toured and recorded with Melissa Manchester and Rick Springfield. He spent five years with Tower of Power and also was part of two tours with Huey Lewis and the News. Then in 1986, he came out with his first solo release "Trolltown" and his destiny changed. Since then, he has recorded 12 additional solo releases and set the stage for a successful solo career.

Just like some smooth jazz artists, Elliot is not as influenced by other jazz performers. He says, Ironically, most of us who make this music consider ourselves more contemporary instrumentalists. In my case and a lot of my peers, we were influenced more by R&B music than jazz as we grew up. Elliot says that smooth jazz radio stations use that name to identify themselves. For marketing reasons, what was needed to kind of get a bit more focus, for lack of a better word, and that's fine. I am happy with, call it polka music if you want, I just know that I enjoy playing the music and making the music and as long as people seem to enjoy listening to it, then I'm happy.

Richard Elliot's newest release is called "Metro Blue" and is kind of a throwback to his early years.  When I started working on the project, that wasn't the intent. Ironically, a lot of my influences go back to early R&B music, says Elliot. In the process of creating the CD, it did kind of end up leaning in that direction. What was my motivation with it was to make it an very organic type of a record. Definitely real funky, lots of horns in it. I co-produced it with Rick Braun, who's an incredible trumpet player and a solo artist in his own right. Just by the pairing of us coming together, both being horn players, we leaned in that direction and that did kind of take it in kind of a retro type area.

Besides Braun, Elliot gets a lot of his friends that he has worked and toured with to help him on "Metro Blue." He says, That's the nice thing about this genre of music is that it's a very close knit community. Everyone pretty much knows each other. There's very little problem with egos in this genre of music. People like Peter White and Jeff Lorber were very helpful with the project and were very happy to come on board. It just makes the project more fun and more fulfilling to be able to get together with your friends and make music together.

Three of Richard Elliot's friends have come together to bring one of the most successful tours in recent years to audiences nationwide. It's called Jazz Attack and features not only Elliot, Braun and White, but singer/guitarist Jonathan Butler, who was on last year's Hot Summer Nights tour with saxophonist Dave Koz. Elliot says, The tour has been doing very well, knock on wood. Obviously it's important for people to buy tickets and, yes, they have. It's been very successful in that regard, but getting back to the more self indulgent side of it, is that it's so much fun working with these guys again. The four of us know each other. We've know each other for years. We've played together live, we've played on each other's records. When we get a chance to go out on the road and tour together, it's very special because we have a lot of laughs. We have a great time and that come off during the performance in terms of people picking up on it. They can tell if you're going through the motions or if you're really sincere and really having a good time and being inspired by the other artists on stage.

The Jazz Attack tour is different than other tours that use multiple artists. Elliot says, One thing that we do a little different with 'Jazz Attack' is unlike some of the other collaboration tours which we've all been a part of, like namely 'Guitars and Saxes,' which has been a tour that's done very well over the last few years. That tour is set up where each artist has a segment, let's say a 30 minute segment, where they play their music. During that segment, they might be joined by one or two of the other artists. 'Jazz Attack' took a different approach. We treated it like a band. In other words, we're pretty much all out there together the whole show. Occasionally one artist might be there by himself or maybe there's three artists up there or two, but very seldom is there just one artist by themselves. We wanted to create it more like a real collaboration. It's tremendous fun and people seem to be responding to it also.

Richard Elliot's new CD "Metro Blue" is the first release on the new label that he and Rick Braun formed with two other executives. It's called ARTisan Music Group and Elliot says, We finally decided after both of us doing work as solo artists for 20 years, we wanted to maybe take a little more control of our destinies. There is a lot of interesting things happening in the record business, not all of them positive, that has forced some of the larger labels to get very narrow visioned. This tends to happen every 20 years or so where the record business goes into some kind of recession. Generally what happens is they start cutting and hacking the amount of attention and human resources that they could put towards what they consider to be alternative music. When I say alternative music, I mean things like classical music, jazz music, smooth jazz, in this case, other things that are not what you consider to be mainstream or let's say pop multimillion sellers.

Elliot says the cutting of resources from major labels provides an opportunity for him and other artists. It creates a really nice opportunity for smaller labels to come up and work with artists who are looking for more hands on, not feeling like they're a tiny fish in a huge pond and are really feeling a priority, says Elliot. That's why we started ARTisan Records. We wanted to kind of create a kind of haven for ourselves to start with, but also for other artists who are friends and colleagues to come on board and just be in a more conducive environment with people, not just Rick and myself, but our partners. People like Steve Chapman and Al Evers, who are people who are not musicians, but very plugged in to the smooth jazz arena. They understand that smooth jazz for a lot of people represents a lifestyle, not just a type of music that they enjoy. We really want to kind of take advantage of that and really make sure we can cater more to the listeners of this music then maybe some of the large labels are.

Richard Elliot's new ARTisan Music project can not only be used to release records, but help to encompass all the things that listeners take part in. He says, It's happened before. We're not the first ones. If you think back to the last sort of real big record company recession that happened, that's when labels like GRP and Windham Hill popped up. They signed up artists who are a little different then the mainstream and they ended up doing very well with it. It represented kind of a lifestyle. The other thing that we do also is that we're embracing the online side of things maybe a bit more than the larger labels. It seems like a lot of the older, larger lables have sort of been dragged into the information highway sort of kicking and screaming because they're used to a way of doing things, which is brick and mortar. You put out a record, you send it to a record store, people go into the record stores and buy them. The whole online thing has disrupted that for them and it's forced them to start to look at, okay, we have got to get savvy about this, but not really embracing of it and you're really find it's more the smaller, new labels that are really embracing it.

Richard Elliot is an artist that knows what happened before and what is coming next. His new release "Metro Blue" mixes both his beginnings in rhythm and blues with the newest in distribution with a label that he co-owns. With the passion that he uses in his music brought to the new project, there is nowhere to go but up. Elliot takes the chances and wins, both in music and in life. A continuing success story.

Click here for printer-friendly version of review.

Send this page to a friend.